Media Gallery

Sometimes the only way into the heart of a city, with its layers of history and teeming populace, is through the overlooked detail, the back-alley tale, the surreal. In A Matter of Rats, Amitava Kumar offers a sensitive portrait of his hometown Patna, using city's rat infestation as a entry point into city bureaucracy, history, and the caste system. Uday Prakash’s The Walls of Delhi traces three intertwined stories that capture the city's corruption and frenetic energy, from a baby's dangerously-expanding head to a love affair at the Taj Mahal. Valleria Luiselli is debuting with a double-book: her non-fiction ruminations from Mexico City, Sidewalks, with her novel Faces in the Crowd, in which a young mother unearths the work of a Mexican poet and his relation to the Harlem Renaissance.

The Walls of Delhi will be read in Hindi by Uday Prakash and in English by its translator, Jason Grunebaum. The readings will be followed by a discussion with Jonathan Shainin, news editor of newyorker.com.

Amitava Kumar is a novelist, poet, journalist, filmmaker, and Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College. He is the author of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb and Nobody Does the Right Thing: A Novel; Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate, a New York Times "Editors' Choice" selection; Bombay—London—New York, a New Statesman (UK) "Book of the Year" selection; and Passport Photos.

Uday Prakash is a writer, journalist, translator, and filmmaker. He has published more than 20 books in Hindi. The Walls of Delhi was a finalist for this year’s DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He is one of the most translated Hindi authors and his writings have been translated into Urdu, English, German and Japanese. His books in English translation are Short Shorts Long Shots, Rage Revelry and Romance, The Girl with the Golden Parasol.

Jason Grunebaum is a Senior Lecturer and Hindi at the University of Chicago. His English translation of Uday Prakash's The Girl with the Golden Parasol was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. His translation of The Walls of Delhi was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and is a finalist for the Jan Michalski Prize.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983. Her novels and essays have been widely translated and work has been published in magazines and newspapers including the New York Times, Review, Granta,and Internazionale. She teaches Creative Writing at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana and is studying for a a PhD in Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Jonathan Shainin is the news editor of Newyorker.com. Previously, he was senior editor of Caravan. He was a fact-checker for The New Yorker from 2005 to 2007. Shainin was the founding editor of The Review, a supplement to The National in Abu Dhabi. He has also worked at The New York Review of Books and his work has appeared in Salon, The Nation, The Paris Review and more.

Events

Four Sessions, 3 hours each (6-9pm)
Tuesdays, August 8, August 15, August 22, and August 29
Fees & Payment Options:
$220 General / $200 AAWW Members (JOIN THE FAN CLUB!)
Full payment due before first class. Maximum of ten students.
Why you should take this class: Writer & Director Darine Hotait bridges the gap between literature and cinema due to her genuine fascination and devotion to both. A mentor in numerous screenwriting workshops at film festivals and institutions such as the Med Film Festival in Rome, Arab Film Festival in Rotterdam, Mizna Literary Gathering in Minneapolis, among others —Darine invites you to learn how to take the elements that construct a screenplay into development: act structure, character development, and scene breakdown.
Class Description: Develop your screenwriting skills with award-winning writer and director Darine Hotait, whose films screened at top international film festivals, received multiple Best Fiction awards and were acquired by Sundance TV, AMC Networks & BBC Channel. Her feature screenplays were selected at Cannes Film Festival's International Scriptwriters' Pavilion and were among the top 5 finalists at Hearst Screenwriting Competition. She's the recipient of the AFAC cinema grant and a current literary fellow at New York Foundation for the Arts.
Over the period of 4 weeks, writers will be guided through the process of developing a feature film screenplay using various hands-on exercises. Participants are expected to have a one-page storyline that they wish to develop into a feature film screenplay during the workshop. REGISTER HERE
Questions? Contact Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org
Darine Hotait is the writer and director of various short films Beirut Hide and Seek (2011), and I Say Dust(2015), which screened at over 70 international film festivals and received multiple Best Short Fiction awards. Her films received prestigious distribution and were acquired by reputable platforms such as AMC Network, Sundance Channel, BBC Channel, Shorts International & The Journal of Short Films. Her debut science fiction feature film project Symphony of a Flood was selected at the International Screenwriters' Pavilion at Cannes Film Festival 2016 and was a finalist at the prestigious Hearst Screenwriting Competition at San Francisco Film Society.
Her plays and short stories have been published in numerous publications in print and online. Darine has mentored over 50 screenwriting workshops around the world at various institutions and international film festivals. Since 2010, Darine serves as the founder and creative director of Cinephilia Productions in New York City, an incubator for the development of writers and filmmakers from the MENA region.
Praise for I Say Dust (2015)“The film’s power and beauty comes in its subtlety. The story’s intensity and potency lies in Darine’s ability to sing cinematic brilliance in the interstices between scenes and to reveal more about the characters in their silence. The plot is unsaturated and always in dialogue with the audience: what is strategically unpictured by Darine is viscerally felt by the viewer.”
— Leena Habiballah, Qahwa Project, US“The characters are complex, the writing – interspersed with poetry – is so touching, and the shots so poignant it just seems like a damn shame it’s a short rather than a feature length film.”
— Wided Khadraoui, Kalimat Magazine“There is romance, sweet and ephemeral - an encounter more potent, perhaps, for the sense of coming home. A thoughtful film which packs a lot of ideas into a tight space, I Say Dust speaks well to the talents of those involved. It’s no surprise that it has multiple awards to its name.”
— Jennie Kermode, Eye For Film (Edinburgh)..

Four Sessions, 2 hours each (7-9pm)
Wednesdays August 9th, August 16th, August 23rd, August 30th
Fees & Payment Options:
$200 General / $180 AAWW Members (JOIN THE FAN CLUB!)
Full payment due before first class. Maximum of fifteen students.
Why you should take this class: Poet Sally Wen Mao, award-winning author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014), has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2013, BOMB Magazine, Poetry, and more. You can explore Lavender Town in The Margins and check out the feature in Bustle listing her as one of the best poetry debuts in the last five years. Sally Wen Mao invites you to re-invent language and to re-invent the familiar in this protest poetry workshop.
Class Description: We are living in a senseless political era. How do we react, as writers, artists, and citizens? Where do we channel our anger, our protest, our ideals – how do we do right by our art and our politics? In this workshop, participants consider the political poem and examine the ways to approach resistance through language, lyric, and form—in poetry or in lyric essays. Drawing from contemporary poets like Layli Long Soldier, Tommy Pico, Timothy Yu, Srikanth Reddy, Solmaz Sharif, and Claudia Rankine, we will examine over the course of several sessions the tools we can use to dismantle the powerful narratives that silence and oppress – and in that process, discover our own political voice. This course will include writing exercises and generative sessions as well as a workshop.
REGISTER HERE
Questions? Contact Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org
Sally Wen Mao is the author of OCULUS (Graywolf Press 2019) and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Poets & Writers, The Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, Kundiman, Jerome Foundation, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference, among others. Her poems have received a Pushcart Prize and published in Tin House, Poetry, Best American Poetry 2013, and A Public Space, among others.
​”​Linguistically dexterous and formally astute, Mao’s tight and textured debut ​[Mad Honey Symposium] ​conjures an absurd, lush, occasionally poisonous world and the ravenous humans and animals that travel through it. . . . With echoes of Glück and Plath, Mao generates stunning landscapes where the flora and fauna reflect her presence and strength of voice.​”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“In Mad Honey Symposium, Sally Wen Mao offers delicious diction: ‘archipelago . . . arpeggios;’ ‘horntails / swarm the wax leaves;’ ‘Fetal and feral, we curl;’ ‘mouth on your pendulum;’ ‘in the rigmarole of lucky living—!’ She also offers a heightened attention to how words work and work out in various contexts. The poet takes us all over the place in time and geography—from her mother’s bed to Audubon’s dreams to sputnik to hive and back again—all in the service of feeling deeply. A lovely debut collection.”
—Kimiko Hahn..